Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Just a reminder that the Phorm Protest takes place tomorrow in London outside BT's AGM at the Barbican Centre. The purpose of the event is to protest against plans by BT Group PLC, Virgin Media and Car Phone Warehouse to deploy intrusive technology across their broadband networks for the purpose of profiling the behaviour of their customers, with the intention to sell this to Phorm Inc. (formerly 121Media) and used for their Open Internet Exchange (OIX) service.

The purpose of the protest is twofold:

1. To raise public awareness on the issues surrounding behavioural advertising and threats it places on privacy.

2. To present the City of London Police with a case file based on covert trials carried out by BT and Phorm (then 121Media) in 2006/2007. The Covert Trials In 2006 and 2007 Bt and Phorm (then 121Media) carried out two covert trials of this technology (called PageSense in 2006, ProxySense in 2007 and WebWise in the present) which means they did not seek the consent of their customers. These trials constituted criminal and civil offenses under various laws. You can read more information about this here plus a legal analysis of the trials here .

Baroness Miller is kindly giving a speech at 1:15pm as well as a few other people including Alex Hanff in the noon-2pm period.

The protest starts at 10am and will continue through to the late afternoon.

Alex will be presenting the CoL Police with a dossier of evidence calling for an investigation of the BT Covert Trials in 2006/2007.

Alex had a meeting with CoL Police last week and they have agreed to look at the dosier officially (as opposed to just passing the buck) so that is at least some progress.

He started his career in investment banking, working at JP Morgan, Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley before going into business on his own. His past ventures include selling joyrides on Russian fighter jets - Migs Etc.

Previously, his most notable foray online was as the founder of PeopleOnPage, an ad network that operated earlier in the decade and which was blacklisted as spyware by the likes of Symantec and F-Secure.Security firm F-Secure describes PeopleOnPage's software here.

It says: "The spyware collects a user's browsing habits and system information and sends it back to the ContextPlus servers. Targeted pop-up advertisements are displayed while browsing the web."Each installation is given a unique ID, which is sent to the ContextPlus server to request a pop-up advertisement." ContextPlus was the rootkit that PeopleOnPage used to harvest data and hide its presence.

The similarities between this business model and that which could be kicked off by Phorm in the coming months are striking.

UPDATE Wednesday 2.00 pm BST BT have been using Google blogsearch function to hoover up blogiste comment , they called by recently.